South Sudan postpones elections again, until at least end 2026

Children who fled the war in Sudan look in to a nutrition clinic at a refugee centre in Renk, South Sudan, in February 2024. (LUIS TATO / AFP)

South Sudan’s presidency now says an election scheduled for the end of this year will be held in December 2026.The country has been independent since 2011, and has never had an election.The government says it listened to advice from both electoral and security institutions.

South Sudan said Friday that long-awaited elections would be postponed for a further two years, once again extending a transitional period agreed in a peace deal.

Citizens have waited to elect their leaders since South Sudan achieved its hard-won independence from Sudan in 2011, with the world’s newest nation still dogged by violence and political infighting.

While a peace agreement six years ago ended a 2013 to 2018 civil war between President Salva Kiir and his bitter rival, Vice President Riek Machar, feuding between the two has repeatedly delayed a transition that was supposed to pave the way to future elections.

The presidency has “announced an extension of the country’s transitional period by two years as well as postponing elections, which were initially scheduled for December 2024 to December 22nd, 2026”, Kiir’s office said in a Facebook post late Friday.

In the statement, Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomuro said the extension was “in response to the recommendations from both electoral institutions and the security sector”.

The international community has grown increasingly exasperated, as the disputes between the two men have left key provisions of the transitional agreement unfulfilled.

Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged parties to take “urgent steps” to allow the election to take place, while the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) warned of a lack of necessary “technical, legal and operational expertise” for voting to proceed in December.

Key tenets of the 2018 deal remain incomplete, including the creation of a national constitution and the unification of Kiir and Machar’s rival forces.

And a dire lack of funding — despite the land-locked nation’s rich oil reserves — has further hobbled efforts, with bodies like the National Election Commission still not fully operational.

While the commission announced in April that voter registration would begin in June, by early July there was no indication of this happening.

Barely surviving

One of the poorest countries on the planet, South Sudan has spent almost half of its life as a nation at war and continues to be roiled by outbreaks of politically motivated ethnic violence.

A “troika” of Britain, Norway and the United States issued a statement in late June urging political parties to work together and avoid a “consequential” delay.

“History will judge harshly those leaders who failed to act to make such elections possible or who acted to impede them,” it said.

Around 400 000 people died and millions were displaced in the civil war before Kiir and Machar signed a peace deal in 2018 to form the unity government.

Since then, the country has battled flooding, hunger, violence and political bickering as the promises of the peace agreement have failed to materialise.

Despite plentiful oil resources, rampant corruption has left the country largely impoverished, with the ruling elite accused of plundering public coffers.

Petroleum exports account for about 90% of national income, but the government has been deprived of this vital revenue since a pipeline shipping oil from South Sudan was damaged in war-torn Sudan in February.

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